I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.

You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.

As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.